Above all filmmaker Frank V. Ross concerns himself with the here and now. Although he avoids making any grand statements about his work or dissecting his films into themes and narrative through lines, Ross plays with the modern landscape in such a way that it feels a bit like a chronicle, the graceful accumulation of the trends of our time. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his fourth independent feature film Hohokam, a quiet and subtly crafted study of characters and moods all captured in the moment. 

“Happiness and sadness is always in you, and sometimes they surface for no apparent reason,” Ross explains. Working with this concept as merely one layer in a multi-layered story, the film captures the lives of Lori and Anson, a couple living seemingly mundane lives dictated by work, bill paying and reaching for the overwhelming responsibility of adulthood.

“I can identify very much with the idea that you’re at a point in your life where you need to make decisions that deal with the rest of your life, but you also feel like your life is taking over and making choices for you,” says lead actress Allison Latta. “Everyone struggles with that to a certain degree. It’s constantly asking, ‘Is this what I want to do? Is this what life is about?’”

A film full of nuance, Hohokam—written, produced, directed and edited solely by Ross—also speaks volumes about people’s miscommunications and moments of communion, but the thematic stress on these is in no way belabored.

“The whole film is about relationships, and a lot of it is an eavesdropping in undertone. What that undertone shows is that there’s a lot that we take for granted in life, and there’s a lot of special moments that wake us up in life,” says actor Danny Rhodes, who plays the minor role of Guy Evans, Lori's flamboyant best friend.  

However, prescribing holistic themes to the film, or an overall message, just as Ross refuses to do, remains a difficult task.

“I’m not sure if there was an actual overt message that (Frank) was trying to convey. I think it was more just pointing his finger to everyday life that people tend to overlook. It was not some big production where they force some kind of opinion or point of view on you. Frank has a knack of capturing the little things, and that’s what I think he was trying to do with the movie,” says Lonnie Phillips, also an actor in the film.

Outside the film’s narrative, the production also carries a story richly detailed with engaging anecdotes from its writing stages to the editing. While the film itself plays superficially simple, the thought behind every interaction and every frame in the film is deeply rooted in the expansive imaginations and willingness to collaborate of all the cast and crew.

At its ground level, the story came from an inarticulate blog entry written by an unsuspecting girl in Arizona. “She wakes up, goes to work, cleans up her puppy’s mess; it’s just kind of numb, and she’s bored. She’s like, “I want to join the Peace Corps. I want to do something.” I figured that a majority of the time that’s how we feel, and then just sometimes we get happy. Sometimes things happen that allow us to forget about all that and just enjoy the circumstance that we are in for a day or two,” Ross says.  

In an appropriate turn of coincidence considering the blog entry, and despite the fact that he’s based in Illinois, Ross set the story in Arizona, an area he’d wanted to shoot in for a while. “Arizona represents modern arrogance to me. I feel like there really shouldn’t be a city there. The Gilbert Water Report, a line from the report is, “In Gilbert we have plenty of water but none to spare.”  I just thought that was a weird thing to put. You’d think in a modern society water wouldn’t really be a problem, but since they are in the desert, it is a problem. The fact that that’s ignored, and people just keep moving out there and buying real estate, it was just the setting where I wanted to put that story.”

The title of the film itself too is a direct reference to the American Southwest, particularly to the group of Native American Indians who were classified by archeologists as the Hohokam. While the Hohokam inhabitants had resided in the area for hundreds of years, by 1450 the tribes had all but disappeared. In a way, by linking Lori and Anson with the forgotten tribes, Ross admits, that he’s playing with the idea of ethnography, of the particular study of this one couple in this one culture that at some time, like all cultures do, will fade.

In such, by crafting a film about two everyday people, Ross exercises the precision of a researcher, focuses his lens on, as Phillips mentioned, small details and finding importance in every landscape. With the rampant real estate development in Arizona, however, the landscapes--in the most literal sense--weren’t the same from one day to the next.

Says Ross: “I wrote half the script while I was in Arizona… I walked around and drew a map, and I circled all the locations, the places I wanted to go and shoot. By the time I went back, and there wasn’t much of a gap in time, everything had already changed. The other interesting thing about where we were is that you look at one side of the street and it looks very modern, and you turn around, and it just looks like a desert. There’s no way to capture that in a movie, how funny it actually is. Modern town. Desert. Without doing a crane shot which wouldn’t have been effective anyway. We ended up just holding off all the exteriors until we were there for a while. Then when you’d see stuff, it’s like okay, “We’re going to jog past that. Let’s jog over here.”

In terms of approaching the interior character landscapes, the lead performances by Latta and actor Anthony Baker valued naturalism and constraint.

“Basically, (Anson’s) very simple and happy with little things which was awesome to play because I’m not like that,” Baker says. “ I do know some people who are like that, and I almost envy them in a way. They might come off as boring or unexciting, but to me it’s awesome when someone has that quality. The littlest things pleased (Anson). He had his girlfriend; he had his job, and for the most part he was pretty happy in a very simple way which I really, really liked, and I kind of went to bat with that with him.”

A veteran of Ross’ features Oh! My Dear Desire and Quietly on by, Baker expected a fluid leap into developing the character of Anson, but the process, he admits, is always much more challenging than originally expected. As his characters have condensed into increasingly introspective spaces, Baker pulls progressively less out of himself emotionally from film to film in order to nail an honest performance.

“That was my focus. Never bring in colors, never bring in anything extraordinary in terms of acting or moviemaking. It was more like, “Be bland. Be bland on purpose because a lot of times that’s how life is.” That’s what’s beautiful about it,” he says.

Unlike Baker, Latta signed onto the film as a first time feature film actress. With a background in theater, Latta connected to Ross through a drama instructor, and in a story equal parts cute and offensive won the free-spirited part of Lori based on her unconscious calm and confidence.

“The cute version is that (Allison) burped really loud, and we had just met. That burp she does in the movie, she does that. That’s just something she does. We were talking, and I was in the middle of a sentence, and she just turned to the left and “Brrrrrrrrrrrr.” Then I kept talking, and I was like, “That was disgusting. That’s not how you behave. Show a little decorum.” I thought, “That’s probably what we need because I really want to film that burp,” Ross recalls. “Also, I asked her how old she was, which is kind of this thing you get to do when you’re casting people. I abuse it. It’s not right. I’ve stopped doing auditions because I’d get obsessed about asking every woman how old she is. It’s not a good side of me. I asked her how old she was, and she said she was thirty. She said it with confidence, but there was something else going on in her head when she said that. “Oh, he’s looking for somebody younger,” or I don’t know what because I’m not a thirty-year-old woman. But, when she said thirty, she said it very confidently,…but there was insecurity there. I figured if you could see that just talking to her just over coffee, she’d probably be all right in the movie. I went back and forth on it for a while, but I knew that Allison would make Lori her character as opposed to my idea of this girl.”

In a quick aside, Ross adds: “And, she gave me a hug, and I love hugs.”

With Baker already living in Arizona and Latta stationed in Chicago, the two actors met first on the phone, a conversation that despite attempts at ease was more than a bit awkward.

“I think all of us were hoping everything would be fluid, but it was a bit uncomfortable. We’d read the script, and we really wanted to sell this. We really wanted to make it a very nonchalant and loving relationship,” Baker says. “It was funny because what broke the ice was that we both talked about that. When she got there, we hung out a little bit. I watched some demo footage of her and Danny, and I thought it was great, and I was really excited. We both mentioned that we were a little uneasy because we’d never met each other, and we had to blast right into this. By both having that worry, actually helped.”

Sharing a small apartment, Ross, Latta and Baker lived and worked together, breathing life into the film with lots of freedom. “One good thing about Frank is that he never says ‘No.’ He’s willing try anything. You might say, ‘Can we do that again? I just had this idea.” As long as we’re not going to ruin the rest of the day of shooting, he’s willing to try things,” Latta says. “Even though he would be setting angles, we were encouraged to try new things and do things a little bit different each time. If it wasn’t exactly the same, not only was the okay, it was great because it gives him more to work with.”

A break in scheduling left room to include shooting scenes with Rhodes for a few days. He flew to Arizona, communing with his fellow actors while discovering a few facts about himself.

“This was the first time I was ever cast gay in a pretty substantial role. It was interesting to me because I was kind of like, the director wrote this, and “It’s me. This is me.” Then, when I read the script, I was like, “Oh, but it’s really not me at all.” It was interesting to play that, something somewhat close to me but still worlds away from me,” Rhodes says. “Acting makes you aware of the stereotypes you hold in your own life; I try not to stereotype people. I try to take people as individuals. But, acting is a constant reminder, no matter who you are or what you believe in, that we do stereotype. Just the fact that I thought that, “Oh because I’m gay, I have this role nailed,” was stupid. It was fun because it’s something I could go over the top with but with a purpose in mind, and Frank’s purpose in mind.”

While on a character-to-character level Ross defines his purpose with a directorial decision of “yes” or “no,” he can’t pinpoint his overall purpose in making films. “I don’t know why I want to do this, why I like to do this. I just do it, and it feels right sometimes.”

“I don’t think I have anything to say,” he adds, “but I’ve seen things that I can react to…There’s always going to be stuff to react to. It doesn’t have to be political. It doesn’t have to be spiritual. It doesn’t have to be religious. It doesn’t have to have some sort of message. You see this woman lean out of the bar in such a way, pick up an ashtray, empty it into a bag, and you say, “Okay, I’m going to make a movie about that.”

Much as the careful detail of the description above, Ross stands out for his emphasis in writing dynamic secondary characters, and although none may serve a direct purpose in the almost non-existent plot for Hohokam, they certainly influence the way his lead characters respond to each other.

“I feel like if I was in a movie, I would be a secondary character. So I just try to give myself as much presence and dimension as possible,” Ross says without a hint of sarcasm or jest. “Plot is a dead end. Morals are a dead end. Themes are a dead end. Everything is a dead end but the characters in my opinion…You just have to focus on the interactions on those characters because they make it interesting. It’s like if two of your friends come to you and tell you this story about this hilarious thing, and they can’t even finish the story they’re laughing so hard, and they say, “You had to be there.” And, you say, “I guess I did because I don’t think this is very funny.” A movie needs to be a ‘had to be there’ story.”

Without stamping a definitive message out for the audience, Hohokam offers a realistic note of connection. “I would love for the (audience) to see someone they know in the film, or see themselves in the film, even if it’s only for a brief glimpse. It’s not necessarily identifying with the whole character but with a situation or a moment,” Latta says. “We watch movies to be entertained and taken away from ourselves. Hopefully a little of that happens too. I hope they enjoy it above all else.”

For more information on the film, visit www.molehillindependent.com.

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